Beautiful Crazy 乱青春

Many of you have probably seen this image somewhere related to yours truly and you might have had questions regarding it. Well, the moment of truth is upon thee!

I cannot believe it has taken me this long to finally write about this movie. Seriously, how long has it been since I got the DVDs? I believe I bought it (along with Spider Lilies and Candy Rain) all the way back in 2009. So that makes it more than 4 years!

Well, at the very least I have an idea why and that is because I did not like this movie that much when I first watched it, especially given that I watched Candy Rain and Spider Lilies at around the same time. Those two movies were straight forward and made complete sense to my then still green-bottomed self when it comes to yuri. I was into the clean yuri back then when unless girls looked adoringly into each other’s eyes or kissed or slept together, they wouldn’t be considered shippable! I was so young then.

So then Tuesday night I re-watch both Spider Lilies and this movie and I found myself getting embarrassed at how strongly I reacted to this movie back then. I remember that after it was over I hid the DVD so far in the closet that I wished to completely forget about it. Watching it again I realized why I did not like it that much in the beginning. The reason was that the ships were fucked up. You all know how I get when a ship I am supporting is not to be. Usually it is my fault but not this time. You only need to see the poster for this movie to know I was right in shipping Xiao-bu and Angel. Saying this you probably already can imagine what the movie had in store for them.

But it was not just this ship, the other one was also all over the place. Even after calming down and watching the movie again after a lot of experience I still couldn’t figure out what their deal was! This other couple is Xiao-bu and Ah-Mi (Or Amy as the semi-subs named her). But the ships were only part of the whole problem. The story telling and the direction was un-nerving and the system the director (Chi Y. Lee) chose to adopt as the flow of the story, jumping between future, present and past, was so frequent it hurt my brain.

But even as broken as it seemed, even as some might consider it just another art of direction, Beautiful Crazy is just as the title says – It is crazy no doubt about it but beautiful at the same time. I believe it needs a couple of watches to grow on people and there are some scenes that you will definitely want to revisit not to mention that the story is not one that you can grasp in a single run through. So I guess with that kind of thinking this is a great movie.

The story follows the lives of three girls whose lives are mysteriously intertwined but all have that same focal point and that is Xiao-bu. The story takes place in different timelines at the same time so it gets a bit hard to follow but like I said, a couple of watches and you will be on top of the game. I myself still need a few more to fully grasp it but for now what I know is that Angel and Ah-Mi are the future (ship), Xiao-bu and Ah-Mi are the present, and Xiao-bu and Angel were the past. So, when you see these different ships you should know right away where in the story this is taking place. The story is about these three girls’ connection to one another and feelings they hold for each other, mostly with Xiao-bu because she was the main catalyst and can be considered the main out of the mains.

Angel Yao as Angel

Chien-hui Liao as Ah-Mi

Amiya Lee as Xiao-bu

From that then our cast is as follows; Angel – who is my favourite character out of the three main girls, is played by Angel Yao. Xiao-bu is portrayed by Amiya Lee and Ah-Mi by Chien-hui Liao. I haven’t seen anything else from these three, be it before Beautiful Crazy or after so our acquaintance is limited to this movie. I like what I saw from all of them though so I doubt it was their first or last acting roles.

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